This specification relates to computer-implemented modeling of gas and liquid flows in turbines.
Computer simulation of gas and liquid flows in axial-flow turbo machines is a sophisticated class of applied computational fluid dynamics problems due to combination of geometrical complexity of the computational domain and the large impact of additional physical effects, such as flow turbulence and separation, blade tip vertices, and wake instability. High fidelity discrete models based on 3D unsteady Navier-Stokes equations result in computationally demanding and expensive simulations.
Simpler models for such turbine systems can be constructed by a disk actuator model using 2D Navier-Stokes equations in which all blade wheels are modeled in an unducted turbine of zero thickness in an incompressible fluid of constant density.